Traveling south on US Route 1 near my home in North Carloina I pass by Lake Jordan and experience the South in a way that very few have a chance to in today's fast-paced jet-fueled digitally networked life. Some might say rural, certainly not backwoods, but from any perspective it is a beautiful stretch of the original auto-route (c.1909) between Washington DC and Atlanta. Endless stretches of mown grass and tall southern pines. It's just one reason I moved here from the cement sprawl of Los Angeles four years ago. It turned out to be a much needed and cathartic detour from my daily chores in the office.

I had a place to be and a time to be there...I wouldn't have driven so far past my favorite fishing spot and a dozen golf courses if I didn't. It was made clear to me that this trip would be worth my time. The drive was nice...

People like shiny things; we all know that. And technically-minded people like technically shiny things. We also know that different people see different things, even when they are looking at the same thing.

Really.

Case in point: We recently received a couple of Cube 3D printers to take a look at and get familiar with, etc. The Cube 3D printer is a 3D printer that anyone can use to print out custom items such as toys, jewelry, mugs, etc., and it’s supported by the cubify.com web site, where you can download designs or buy 3D prints. But while printing pretty custom jewelry is all well and good, I was seeing the technical details. I was more interested in investigating and understanding the following:

It has admittedly been a while since we posted here, mostly because Richard Sandham has barricaded himself into a script development dungeon, from which he only appears when someone utters, “Bagels in the kitchen.” With that in mind I was asked to fill in for a blog or two.

Hello!...and Seasons Greetings from GPSE central! (To: Marketing...See? I DO have fingers and I CAN type.) It's been far too long since my last post and there is much to tell...so, getting on with it... Let's start with the fact that I have changed roles here at Geomagic. It's now "official" so I can finally share... I am no longer Development Support Specialist and Evangelist. I am now Geomagic's Senior Custom Software Development Specialist. Truth be told I wanted to set a record and 'Longest Title' was the only one left...so here we are, new role, sitting on the doorstep of 2013...and weeks away from the release of our new 2013 line-up...

Necessity truly is the mother of invention. Here's an example. Someone (who will go unamed...OK, me) that does not scan every day, ran into a little problem. I'm working on a project for another article that involves scanning a disassembled mouse. I scanned one side, flipped it, and scanned the other without thinking too much about the model formation in Studio....and this is what I saw when I looked at the screen...

Sculpture has always been a fascination for me and has influenced my career more of late than during the earlier years. Mixing art and technology has always proven interesting and adding ancient culture to the equation raises the bar to new levels.

My role here at Geomagic is to help system integrators, to help the automation specialists...to help those that are interested in pushing the limits of their existing technology. My role is also to help our team push our own technology in these areas; primarily the Geomagic Python Scripting Environment, but it goes beyond our technical implementation, beyond our internal efforts. It involves growing an ecosystem of developers and partners.

Lately I've been having to perform a lot of vector math...what fun. Luckily the GPSE comes preloaded with helper functions and overloaded arithmetic operators. Here's today's nugget...projecting points to a plane.

System integration is where the "rubber hits the road" when we talk about process computerization and automation in the same sentence. Computerization alone for tasks such as 3D part inspection or the analysis and preparation of scans for rapid prototyping may not provide an optimal process conversion from manual to digital.

Automation adds a new level of productivity, a new level of speed, and an integral part of it is communicating the resultant data to and from connected sensors and computing systems. Seamlessly transferring data to and from other formats, other systems, and other applications is crucial. However, there are times where a simple cut and paste will suffice, and although we are working hard to make this easier and GUI driven, GPSE has an answer...